FBB software (bobcat & bisonc++) on the mac

23 Jul 2011

Installing software by Frank Brokken (FBB) on the mac used to be a bit of a hassle. The build software is somewhat tailored to Linux (specifically Debian). However, with homebrew installation on the mac is now almost as convenient as on Debian. I have prepared some formulae (that’s what homebrew calls packages) for icmake, yodl, bobcat and bisonc++.

There are two ways to install these packages: either by providing the URL of each formula on the command line to brew install (in the correct order), or by downloading the formula in /usr/local/Library/Formula (or whatever brew
--prefix tells you instead of /usr/local) and then issuing brew install
bisonc++.

The --use-gcc option is required because by default homebrew will try to compile using the llvm-gcc compiler. The --enable-cxx makes sure g++-4.6 will also be installed. Compiling gcc will take some time though. On my machine (a MacBook, 2.2Ghz Core 2 Duo) it took about 50 minutes.